With the release of the first Watch_Dogs long done and the reports that the game will be the first of a whole franchise of games, what can players expect from Watch_Dogs 2? A similar game from Ubisoft, Assassins Creed, showed an impeccable capability to learn from their mistakes and make vast improvements.
Like Watch_Dogs, the original Assassins Creed was a great game, but not an incredible one. It had all the mechanics to be great, but fell short in one-too-many ways — and many of the problems both games face are similar.
After the main story has finished the draw to the game dies rather quickly. With a very limited amount of side-missions and random events, Watch_Dogs struggles to find a variety of daily activities. The original Assassins Creed showed a similar lack of depth in its daily actions, but Assassins Creed 2 showed ample variety by changing the missions available to you during the night among many improvements.
So if we use Assassins Creed 2 as a guideline, how can Watch_Dogs enhance their gameplay experience?
- More elaborate mission depth. After a while, running down criminals shows to have an unfortunate similarity to each encounter. With each culprit being slightly slower than your character, Aiden, and their wildly inaccurate shooting, it makes it far too easy to shoot down or stop a criminal. It’s fair to expect a greater variety in their reactions to you.
- Incorporate additional hacking abilities. While there was a decent mix of abilities, it felt as though much more could have been done. Hacking individual lights of streetlamps and cars could be a great addition.
- Improve car physics. Right now, cars are hardly slowed down by what’s in a players’ path. You can absolutely demolish CPU vehicles and roll through any impeding objects. While the physics can’t be overly realistic, they need to find a reasonable middle ground.
- A world with mystery. While Watch_Dogs has a decently sized world to explore, almost everything about the game is revealed to you from the start. This killed any motivation to explore the outliers of the game. Give players reason to explore the game world by rather than locating everything on the players’ map from the start.
- A bigger world. Watch_Dogs put themselves up to a direct comparison to Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos, but Watch_Dogs’ city of Chicago is nowhere on the same scale. Designing solely for the new generation of consoles should warrant a world even bigger than that of Los Santos. (And the end of the game heavily suggest that the next game will take place in a new city.)
Besides the graphical improvements and new setting, Ubisoft has the potential to make Watch_Dogs 2 one of the best games of this generation. There just needs to be greater substance to the gameplay.
[…] It can be assumed the tweet is referring to an upcoming DLC, though it could even be a hint of a Watch_Dogs 2 (highly […]